Redmond turns to Linux AGAIN for Azure data science primer

Microsoft has taken a data science bundle it crafted last November and put it onto an Azure-hosted Linux VM. The combo, announced at Microsoft’s Cortana blog, takes CentOS 7.2, runs it up as an Azure virtual machine image, and packages it with a slew of data science tools. Microsoft had already run up a Windows Server 2012-based offering, which it announced in November 2015. If nothing else, a “turn it on and use it” Linux data science bundle will save experimenters from having to pray they don’t drop into “dependency” hell to put together a list of tools that includes R Open with the math kernel library, Python 2.7 and 3.5 (the Anaconda distribution), the Azure CLI and Storage Explorer, and PostgreSQL. The machine learning suite includes Azure ML, Redmond’s…